Inclusive Fitness as a Key Step Towards More Advanced Social Behaviors in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Settings

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Autori principali: Rosseau, Andries, Avalos, Raphaël, Nowé, Ann
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Rosseau, Andries
Avalos, Raphaël
Nowé, Ann
author_facet Rosseau, Andries
Avalos, Raphaël
Nowé, Ann
contents The competitive and cooperative forces of natural selection have driven the evolution of intelligence for millions of years, culminating in nature's vast biodiversity and the complexity of human minds. Inspired by this process, we propose a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning framework where each agent is assigned a genotype and where reward functions are modelled after the concept of inclusive fitness. An agent's genetic material may be shared with other agents, and our inclusive reward function naturally accounts for this. We study the resulting social dynamics in two types of network games with prisoner's dilemmas and find that our results align with well-established principles from biology, such as Hamilton's rule. Furthermore, we outline how this framework can extend to more open-ended environments with spatial and temporal structure, finite resources, and evolving populations. We hypothesize the emergence of an arms race of strategies, where each new strategy is a gradual improvement over earlier adaptations of other agents, effectively producing a multi-agent autocurriculum analogous to biological evolution. In contrast to the binary team-based structures prevalent in earlier research, our gene-based reward structure introduces a spectrum of cooperation ranging from full adversity to full cooperativeness based on genetic similarity, enabling unique non team-based social dynamics. For example, one agent having a mutual cooperative relationship with two other agents, while the two other agents behave adversarially towards each other. We argue that incorporating inclusive fitness in agents provides a foundation for the emergence of more strategically advanced and socially intelligent agents.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_12555
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Inclusive Fitness as a Key Step Towards More Advanced Social Behaviors in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Settings
Rosseau, Andries
Avalos, Raphaël
Nowé, Ann
Artificial Intelligence
Multiagent Systems
Social and Information Networks
The competitive and cooperative forces of natural selection have driven the evolution of intelligence for millions of years, culminating in nature's vast biodiversity and the complexity of human minds. Inspired by this process, we propose a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning framework where each agent is assigned a genotype and where reward functions are modelled after the concept of inclusive fitness. An agent's genetic material may be shared with other agents, and our inclusive reward function naturally accounts for this. We study the resulting social dynamics in two types of network games with prisoner's dilemmas and find that our results align with well-established principles from biology, such as Hamilton's rule. Furthermore, we outline how this framework can extend to more open-ended environments with spatial and temporal structure, finite resources, and evolving populations. We hypothesize the emergence of an arms race of strategies, where each new strategy is a gradual improvement over earlier adaptations of other agents, effectively producing a multi-agent autocurriculum analogous to biological evolution. In contrast to the binary team-based structures prevalent in earlier research, our gene-based reward structure introduces a spectrum of cooperation ranging from full adversity to full cooperativeness based on genetic similarity, enabling unique non team-based social dynamics. For example, one agent having a mutual cooperative relationship with two other agents, while the two other agents behave adversarially towards each other. We argue that incorporating inclusive fitness in agents provides a foundation for the emergence of more strategically advanced and socially intelligent agents.
title Inclusive Fitness as a Key Step Towards More Advanced Social Behaviors in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Settings
topic Artificial Intelligence
Multiagent Systems
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12555